I heard about it on Perez Hilton. How sad is that?

I saw it on an RSS feed alert pop-up. Then cnn.com.

I have stltoday.com as my homepage, so when I saw the large picture of him posted, I knew it was bad news. Very very sad. He will be missed, and how ironic that in the most exciting presidential campaign season in years, he won’t be here to see it through with his great dry erase board.

Oddly enough, I was not online. I was on the phone with my sister, who had just heard about it on the radio. My husband had tried to text me, but later we realized he texted the wrong number, so somebody in St. Louis got a weird, creepy “Tim Russert: Dead” text message.

Saw it on my homepage, msnbc.com.

Not a very political animal myself, but when I would run across his show, or see him while promoting his book, he always came across as just a genuinely nice guy. From all reports, he apparently was. Such a loss…

I heard about it from a coworker, who directed me to the one-line breaking headline on nytimes.com. Even a Google News search revealed nothing. I posted it on Twitter, and within about 10 minutes it seems the news was everywhere.

In case you were curious, my RSS feed was from the AP.

My wife phoned me from her car while I was at work and then I quickly went to the Drudge Report. I saw the NBC website minutes later which, within the story itself, had Tom Brokaw’s news break-in from a link on YouTube (!). I found that aspect interesting- that the link was from YouTube and not directly from within their own news organization.

All in all, while I liked Tim Russert and viewed him as a fair, inquiring journalist, I’m still amazed at the amount of coverage paid to his death. You’d think a former President had passed away. The incessant need to fill time on cable news networks with ‘news’ apparently gives license to ‘over-cover’ news events, like the death of a mainstream news journalist. Did Lawrence Spivak, the moderator of ‘Meet The Press’ for ten years, receive this kind of attention to his passing? Should he have? How about Chet Huntley or David Brinkley?

The news media seems to be so caught up in their own self-importance (by my observance, not the case years ago) that a newsman’s untimely passing, sadly, almost becomes a parody…

Bill O’Riely 97.1 radio in my truck.
How ironic his son Luke just graduated from Boston College and Mr. Russert and his family were in Rome where they had seen the Pope, God called a great Man Home! R.I.P.Mr. Russert.